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This study aims to contribute to the literature exploring the parents' perspective on what parenting in poverty means in their everyday life and how they are able to cope with the challenges that arise from a condition of economic deprivation. Forty parents living in different Italian regions had been interviewed. Data gathering and data analysis were conducted as a simultaneous and iterative process, oriented by the constructivist grounded theory. Our findings provide a clear picture of the parents' constant struggle to protect their children from an environment in which structural conditions and dominant narratives lead to normalize and personalize disadvantages. Parents described enabling and disabling processes that interplay at a material, relational and symbolic level, influencing their movement along a continuum that depicts different experiences in different moments of their lives, as the output of processes where vulnerabilities and strengths are combined. The parents' knowledge helps to explain the wider social processes and the day-to-day social interactions that influence the flow along this continuum. The final purpose is to allow their voices to be heard and to learn from their perspective, as it is essential in designing policies and services that are supposed to help them.
This contribution explores the experience of parents struggling with poverty when interacting with welfare services meant to support them and their families. Low-income families face ambivalent social attitudes as well as grudging social assistance, often linked to the fear of creating dependency, in a culture that values independence and competition. Scholars have highlighted how these representations have affected common sense discourses, as well as the design of policies and services. This study contributes to this literature, through an in-depth exploration of the parents’ modes of interaction with welfare services. Forty Italian parents were involved in a national research guided by a constructivist grounded theory methodology. The explanatory model emerged from the analysis is useful to shed light on factors that shape the encounters of families and welfare institutions, allowing different levels of trust among them. The parents’ voice helps to uncover several contradictions of the western societal systems, and the different roles welfare services can play in dealing with socially produced inequalities.
L’articolo propone alcuni esiti di una ricerca qualitativa sulla prospettiva da cui madri e padri in condizione di precarietà economica affrontano il loro impegno genitoriale, e su come incontrano l’aiuto offerto dai servizi del welfare. Adottando un approccio intersezionale, si analizzano i processi che generano complesse forme di vulnerabilità sociale che investono i genitori, per cogliere le condizioni di svantaggio determinate dalla sovrapposizione di variabili strutturali e culturali. Lo studio fa luce, da un lato, sulla condizione di “intrappolamento” di cui fanno esperienza i genitori, soverchiati dalla carenza di risorse economiche e dal connesso giudizio sociale di inadeguatezza, dall’altro lato sulle loro strategie di fronteggiamento per riuscire a garantire cure ai figli. Parole chiave: genitorialità; povertà; oppressione; intersezionalità; servizio sociale.
The aim of this article is to explore how social workers represent the experience of parenting in conditions of economic precariousness, and the role of social work in supporting these families. The analysis is useful to show how poverty of the families and poverty of resources dedicated to them within the welfare state system are interconnected issues that should not be viewed as background factors, but as variables that influence in various ways the decisions made everyday in social services. We identify the need for improvement in the institutional framework of public services and in social work education.
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